


We Don't Talk About Cairo

by Nativestar



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Cold Open Challenge, Episode: s01e21Cigar Cutter, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, References to Cairo (MacGyver TV 2016)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:01:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25126660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nativestar/pseuds/Nativestar
Summary: Jack and Mac don't talk about Cairo.  This is the real reason why.
Comments: 34
Kudos: 58





	We Don't Talk About Cairo

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Cold Open Challange

Jack was bored.

And worried.

But mostly bored.

He’d been sat on the stairs outside the war room for what felt like hours. _Seriously, what could they be talking about in there?_ Mac barely remembered anything about the mission after the concussion he’d sustained. Jack’s own debrief had barely lasted an hour. Although that may have just been the limit of Patty’s patience with him; he did like to keep his debriefs colourful.

Mac had told him he didn’t need to wait but when Jack had picked him up this morning, Mac had been sullen and had barely spoken to Jack the entire drive into DXS. He’d been acting off the last few days, quieter than normal, giving Jack strange looks and begging off hanging out. He was wound so tight, clearly worried about this debrief, that there was no way Jack was planning on being anywhere but waiting outside.

The door softly clicked open and Mac stepped out.

“You’re still here.” Mac said, his tone so neutral that Jack couldn’t tell if he was grateful or annoyed.

“I told you I’d wait for you.”

“Yeah, but that was--” Mac looked at his watch. “An hour and a half ago.”

“I know.” Jack said standing and stretching stiff muscles. “And my butt knows it too. Why don’t we have chairs out here?”

“Because no one else is dumb enough to wait here for hours.”

Jack shrugged and fell into step beside Mac as they walked out, Mac’s limp barely noticeable now. Mac looked straight ahead, not meeting Jack’s eyes or saying anything. He didn’t look relieved it was over. Jack’s heart sank, if anything Mac seemed even more tense and upset now.

  
“Soooo?” Jack dragged out the word, twisting to try and catch Mac’s eye.

“So what?”

Jack rolled his eyes. “How’d it go?”

“I got an official warning in my file.” Mac said, his tone flat.

“You what?”

“A warning.”

Jack frowned. A warning? He was upset about a _warning_? That was… That wasn’t even a slap on the wrist, it was a finger waggle at best. Why would Mac be upset about that? They’d both had far worse. Considering how FUBAR this mission had gone and how badly their superiors were looking for someone to blame, a warning was getting off lightly. Unless… Dammit, there was something else wrong. Something else was bugging Mac and Jack had missed it. Jack had assumed he knew what was going on, that it had just been the debrief and the stress of trying to explain a mission gone wrong when you had giant holes in your memory, especially for someone like Macgyver who rarely forgot _anything_.

Jack needed to find out what the real reason was.

* * *

Jack didn’t take Mac straight home like he’d asked. He detoured to a quiet, scenic point not far from Phoenix and parked up on the gravel. If Jack hadn’t already figured out something was wrong, Mac not noticing the detour or saying anything would have cemented it.

Mac blinked as Jack killed the engine, suddenly realising that it was trees and a view of the coast in front of him, not his own front door.

“Jack--”

“Something’s been eating at you, bud. I thought it was this debrief, but it clearly wasn’t. And I know its nothing to do with an official warning. So talk.” Jack ordered.

Mac clenched his jaw and stayed stubbornly silent. But his eyes slid over to Jack briefly, and Jack could tell Mac wanted to share, he just needed to wait him out.

“It’s been coming back to me.” Mac eventually said, tensely.

“What?” Jack feigned ignorance even as he suspected that Mac meant the mission in Cairo. Jack mentally cursed their luck. It really was the worst mission ever, couldn’t Mac be spared some of it?

“The last couple of days, my memory has started coming back. I still can’t remember anything after the bomb went off. But I know it wasn’t the terrorists that triggered it. It was me.”

“Mac.” Jack sighed. And there it was. The reason. Jack had told Patty that the bomb was armed by the terrorists. He’d intentionally omitted Mac’s failed bluff from his report. “What exactly do you remember?”

Mac frowned and tipped his head back to rest against back of the seat. “I remember my bluff failing, then its a little hazy but I remember a fight and you getting sliced in the side by that knife.” Jack’s hand drifted to his side, rubbing the fresh and tender scar tissue. “But you somehow got hold of a gun and took out Farhad. A lot of his men turned tail and ran after that.”

Mac swallowed. “And I remember the fail safe that kicked in when the timer hit zero. The one I hadn’t noticed. The one I couldn’t disarm in time.”

Jack could still remember the terror he’d heard in Mac’s voice when he’d told him. The realisation that he’d made a judgement call and it was about to literally blow up in his face. Mac had thought he’d disarmed the bomb when he triggered the timer, he hadn’t had time to search for a back up.

  
“You contained the blast.” Jack reminded him. “I don’t know what you did, but you took the kick out of it. Made sure it wasn’t a dirty bomb.” Jack tried to keep his voice steady. “You told me to leave, you knew I wasn’t going to be moving quick with that injury so you told me to get going and that you’d be right behind me.”

Mac stayed silent, not looking at Jack, but he knew he was listening intently. Although Mac had read Jack’s report, he’d never heard it from Jack directly. He’d asked Jack once, but that had been a while ago, when Mac was still in the hospital and it had been too fresh in Jack’s mind, too much in his nightmares to relive it during the day as well.

“You didn’t give yourself enough time.” Jack continued. “You got caught in the blast. When I found you, you were unconscious and bleeding out from that shrapnel wound in your thigh.”

Mac started rubbing his leg, where a barely healed wound sat under his jeans. Jack wondered if it was the wound or the memory that was bothering him. He still had a week of physical therapy to complete before he could even think about being signed off for field work.

“Why’d you lie?” Mac asked. “You told Thornton that Farhad set it off, but he didn’t. Why weren’t you honest about it being my plan that failed? It was my fault you got stabbed. It was my fault that thousands of people almost died.”

Mac sounded angry, but Jack suspected it was more at himself than it was with Jack.

“There. _That_ is why I didn’t tell you. I knew you’d blame yourself. Plus, no one is ever impressed with bluffs unless they work. I _knew_ the higher ups were looking for a scapegoat, I wasn’t about to hand them one. I figured you’d suffered enough. We’d _both_ suffered enough. It just didn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.” Mac insisted. “And you had no right not to tell me. You didn’t just lie to Thornton, you lied to _me._ ”

Jack got it. He really did. He’d be pissed too if Mac withheld something like this from him. But he just hadn’t seen a better option. Mac wouldn’t remember it, but in the first few days after Cairo, Jack had barely seen Thornton. She’d been involved in back to back meetings, explaining how they’d failed to capture Farhad, lost the potential intelligence he could have given them, failed to stop the bomb and failed to take down the militia that had since gone to ground. Thornton had given Jack only one order: don’t talk to anyone. That had told Jack more than anything how badly their superiors wanted someone to blame.

“I’m sorry, Mac. I wanted to protect you. We were in a tight spot and you made the best decision you could at the time. I just couldn’t trust that everyone else would see it the same. You included.”

Mac shook his head. “I should have come up with something else.” He said, but without conviction. Jack wondered just how many hours he’d spent over the last few days, running the mission through his head, working out every variable, every option. Too many, most likely. But there had been no _better_ options.

“Come up with what? You only had a few seconds to make a decision before you were spotted and I had a gun to my head, I was of no help. You did the best you could, like you always do.”

There were no winners when you played ‘what if’, even if Mac had tried something different there was no guarantee that it would have turned out any better.

“I’m not sure Thornton agrees with you. I had a lecture about how I was a valuable asset and they’d put too much money into training me to lose me to poor judgement. That’s what the warning was for.”

Jack winced. That bit was partly his fault. Mac had told him he’d be right behind him and he’d lied, he’d spent too much time trying to stop the bomb entirely. Something Jack had made very clear in his own report.

“I think Oversight came down pretty hard on her.” Jack deflected. Patty was a good boss but she’d also taken a lot of flack. She probably had to be seen to do something, even if she didn’t agree with it and could never say so.

Mac huffed in frustration. “I don’t get why Oversight was so upset either. Taking risks is part of the job. It’s never been a problem before.”

“Mac.” Jack stopped him and shifted in the seat to face Mac, putting a hand on his shoulder. “This wasn’t like anything we’ve had before, you didn’t just get _injured_ putting yourself at risk, you _died_ , Mac.”

“I didn’t die.” Mac complained, opening his arms wide, as if demonstrating the very fact he was here to object meant he hadn’t died.

“Took them four minutes, buddy. I don’t care what kind of medical label they slap on it. You were dead.” Jack’s voice broke over the word dead and he sucked in an unsteady breath. He still saw it in his nightmares. There’d been so much blood in that warehouse, Jack had seen some bad wounds over the years, but never that volume of blood before, never from _Mac_. Then later, he’d watched light-headed from his own blood loss, behind a glass window as the medics had battled to bring Mac back, trying to push blood in quicker than Mac had been losing it.

Mac watched him, lowering his eyes as he saw the impact it still had on Jack. He was probably going to feel guilty now about Jack’s nightmares too. And Mac had tried to hide it but Jack knew he was already struggling with a few of his own nightmares as well. He’d cut it too close this time.

Good. Jack thought somewhat vindictively. He hated to see the kid hurting but maybe he’d show a little more self-preservation next time. Start to value his life as much as Jack did. Mac was worth more to Jack than some figure the DXS accountants could come up with. He was more than just dollars spent on training and he’d be sure to have words with Patty about that one.

Although depending on what Mac had said, Jack might need to avoid her for at least a few days.

  
“Does Thornton know now?” Jack asked. Lying in an official report was pretty serious and while Jack didn’t much care if there was another reprimand to add to his collection, he’d like to know if he should expect one.

“No.”

“No?”

“If I told her the truth she’d know you’d lied.” Mac said reluctantly.

Jack smiled, it warmed his heart to think that even though Mac was pissed at him he’d still chosen to lie and protect his partner.

“So _you_ were protecting _me_?”

“Yeah, so I guess we’re even.”

  
“Nah, dude. Wookie life debt, remember? It’ll take the rest of my life before we’re even close to even.”

Mac smiled for the first time that day.

  
“Hey,” Jack said.

“What?”

“You know you’re more than just a valuable asset to us. To _me._ ” Jack caught Mac’s eyes. It was important Mac understood this.

“Yeah. I know.” The reply was too quick. Too confident. Jack knew it was Mac’s way of deflecting attention, to move on to the next topic please, but Jack could hear that deep down there were doubts. He wouldn’t be able to convince Mac, not with words at least. But that actually played to Jack’s strengths, he was after all, a man of action. The “Congratulations on finishing physical therapy” party he’d been organising with Bozer and Nikki would hopefully be a good start.

Jack started the car again, and was about to put it into reverse when he suddenly realised something.

“How exactly are we going to keep this from Patty? She’s a human lie detector!” Jack was pretty certain she already knew they were lying about something and had chosen to ignore it, otherwise she’d be dragging them back into the war room, demanding answers and refusing to let them leave until she had them.

“Sooner or later, either you or I will say something. We’ll forget and let something slip.” He continued.

They could trust Nikki, and Thornton _might_ look the other way, but their comms were recorded and documented, analysts looked at them and their superiors could read any transcript they wanted. They had lost their comms during the Cairo mission, but if the hunt for someone to blame continued all it would take was one slip and a simple keyword search for ‘Cairo’ further down the line and the secret would be out.

“I won’t say anything.” Mac said confidently, sounding a little insulted that Jack might think he would let something slip.

Jack rolled his eyes, although the kid had a point. “Okay, fine, it’ll probably be me. Seriously, we won’t be able to keep this a secret forever.”

Mac tilted his head, thinking. “I got it.” He snapped his fingers. “We don’t talk about Cairo.”

“We don’t talk about it?” Jack said sceptically.

“Yeah. Like ever. We’ll make it A Thing.”

Jack heard the capitalisation in his words. A Thing. Yeah, that could work.

“So if I slip and say something like ‘remember that time in Cairo--”

“We don’t talk about Cairo.” Mac interrupted.

“We don’t talk about Cairo.” Jack repeated softly, nodding. That definitely worked for him. “I like it.” And the fact that his science led partner who cheerfully mocked him whenever he mentioned something superstitious was _willing_ to suggest this and never _ever_ mention the disaster mission again, made him smile.

“You know that’s kinda superstitious, Mac.”

“I know.” Mac said as if he was already regretting it, but his lips curled into a soft smile at the same time.

And if Jack had been wondering if he was forgiven for lying, that smile said it all.

“Hey Mac, if we’re doing this superstitious thing, how about we take it a step further and refuse to work on Cairo day, because you know, that’s gotta be bad luck...”


End file.
